Twitter, the internet social network, is developing technology it hopes will prevent the Chinese and Iranian governments being able to censor its users.

Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said Twitter was working on “interesting hacks”, or software, to stop blocking by foreign governments.

Mr Williams, speaking at the World Economic Forum, said he admired Google for its decision last month to confront China over censorship and cyber- attacks on its service, but said Twitter was too small to take a similar stand.

“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers.”

Mr Williams said Twitter had an advantage in evading government censors through operating as a network of internet and mobile applications, rather than as a single website. “Twitter is a network that is accessed in thousands of ways.”

Mr Williams was among executives of social networks, in­clu­d­ing My­Space, Facebook and Linked­In, which were challenged in a debate in Davos to make a statement against censorship. He gave the clearest account of how his company intended to resist surveillance. He did not give details of the technology being developed, to avoid tipping its hand to governments that wanted to block its service, which allows users to post updates for followers.